Prison Officials

BOGOTA, Colombia -- A plane crashed on takeoff Friday during an inmate transfer in western Colombia, killing two prison officials, authorities said. Three others were injured in the crash of the chartered Russian-made Antonov-32 at an airport in the city of Popayan, 230 miles southwest of Bogota.

An inmate serving time in Polk County and his wife in Orlando transferred more than $20,000 from stolen credit cards into prisoner trust fund accounts, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. After Tamika Teague, 34, deposited the money her husband Ronald Teague, 34, sent her nearly $15,000 from the state Department of Corrections check system, according to FDLE. The couple were arrested Tuesday on charges of grand theft. Tamika Teague, a state Department of Health employee, remains held at the Orange County Jail in lieu of $25,000 bail.

Federal prison officials Tuesday defended the treatment of key Whitewater figure James McDougal, who died of a heart attack while in solitary confinement in a Texas prison. McDougal, 57, died Sunday shortly after collapsing at a federal prison in Fort Worth, where he was serving a three-year sentence for fraud and conspiracy. He had been placed in solitary confinement Saturday for refusing to give a urine sample for a random drug test. McDougal, who was cooperating with Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr's investigation of President Clinton's personal finances, had a history of serious health problems.

Stuff happens. How else to explain the latest curious scenario involving the state Department of Corrections? Last year, Florida closed several prisons in a cost-cutting move. Now, heading into next year's legislative session, the department has petitioned lawmakers to scrounge up $59 million so prison officials can pry the padlocks from nine shuttered facilities next year. Why? Despite an overall dip in crime statewide, the nation's third-largest prison system continues to pack prisons to bursting.

County commissioners voted 5-0 Tuesday to ask the Federal Bureau of Prisons to come to Lake County and sell its product to county residents.The federal prison system wants to build a prison on 200 acres of county-owned land near the intersections of the Florida Turnpike, State Road 19 and U.S. Highway 27.''I feel it's appropriate to go further,'' Commission Chairman Chick Gregg said Tuesday. ''I am very much in favor of opening the door.''Patricia Sledge, the bureau's site acquisition coordinator, probably will be here within a week to begin work.

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina -- The new government of President Nestor Kirchner has purged dozens of ranking officers in the nation's penitentiary system in what advisers described Wednesday as an anticorruption drive. It was the latest bold step by a leader who began his four-year term this year by reorganizing the military high command, the federal police leadership and by forcing out an unpopular Supreme Court chief. Authorities said 69 ranking officials in the penitentiary system were sacked in what Justice Minister Gustavo Beliz said was a move to eradicate "hot spots" of corruption within the prison system.

TALLAHASSEE - State prison officials said Monday that they are not trying to avoid public scrutiny by considering banning reporters from interviewing death-row inmates in person.Prison administrators said they are trying to regulate access to journalists who present one-sided or sensationalized snapshots of killers.They say tabloid television programs and electronic magazines raise questions about freedom of the press.``I don't think anyone wants to cut off the legitimate news media ... from having access to our prisons and our inmates,'' Florida State Prison Warden James Crosby said Monday.

JEWISH PRISONERS. A federal appeals court has ruled that Jewish inmates at the State Prison of Southern Michigan should be allowed to travel between complexes at the prison site to attend weekly Sabbath services. A three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last week unanimously rejected claims by Michigan prison officials that permitting the inter-complex travel by six Jewish inmates would pose security problems. The inmates accused prison officials of violating their civil rights.

A former prison inmate who contended he once sold marijuana to Dan Quayle narrowly lost a bid Friday to reinstate his lawsuit accusing prison officials of improperly barring him from publicizing his claim. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit voted 5-4 not to reconsider a ruling by a three-judge panel last October that threw out the lawsuit by Brett Kimberlin. Kimberlin sued two prison officials after he was placed in special detention twice during the closing days of the 1988 election campaign as he tried to contact reporters about his claim about Quayle.

A prison inmate who launched a five-month hunger strike to demand a religious diet has died, despite repeated attempts to force-feed him. Convicted murderer Teshone Abate, 39, stopped eating in August and eventually dropped to 75 pounds - half his original weight - before dying at St. Mary's Hospital in Tucson on Saturday night. In a 1989 federal lawsuit, Abate claimed prison officials failed to provide a diet that conformed to his strict Ethiopian Orthodox Christian beliefs. Prison officials said Abate constantly changed his dietary demands.

Orange-Osceola Chief Judge Belvin Perry's signature was forged on a pair of fraudulent orders that freed two Orlando-area killers - both lifers - in an elaborate paperwork prison break that has sent shockwaves across Florida. Authorities are hunting for Charles Bernard Walker and Joseph Ivan Jenkins, both 34, after they left the Franklin Correctional Institution in the Panhandle within two weeks of each other using fabricated documents authorizing their release. Ninth Judicial Circuit Court officials said the phony paperwork contains the forged signatures of at least two judges and members of the State Attorney's Office - including State Attorney Jeff Ashton.

All it took was five days after Jerry Tyson walked out of prison in north Florida for the convicted killer to be arrested on Christmas Day for the stabbing death of a man in a motorized chair at a McDonald's restaurant in Orlando. Steven Lang, 52, died from butcher-knife blows — just like Tyson's murder victim 12 years earlier. Once again, witnesses told police the longtime mental patient struck after someone refused to give him pocket change. The first time that happened was over bus fare in 1999 outside the West Oaks Mall in Ocoee.

Lawyers for an obese prisoner on Ohio's death row say their client should be spared in part because of his weight, which they say could cause "severe complications" if executioners try to give him a lethal intravenous injection. The argument, reported Monday by the Cleveland Plain Dealer, drew scoffs from the family of Ronald Post's victim, Helen Vantz. Post was convicted in the 1983 shooting death of Vantz, who worked as a desk clerk at an Ohio hotel. "I don't care if they have to wheel him in on a tractor-trailer; 30 years is too long," William Vantz, the victim's son, told the Plain Dealer.

LEAVENWORTH, Kan. (AP) - Law enforcement officers are looking for a man who escaped from the minimum security unit at the U.S. Penitentiary in Leavenworth. Prison officials say 49-year-old Joel Rodriguez was missing from his assigned quarters Sunday afternoon. The prison's statement gave no information on how he might have escaped. Rodriguez was sentenced this year to 98 months in prison for selling drugs. He began serving his sentence on March 28. He is considered non-violent.

A state prisoner pleaded guilty Thursday in the 2006 fatal attack on a popular Sunni Muslim inmate leader at the now-closed Maryland House of Correction. William James Taylor , 42, pleaded guilty in Anne Arundel County Circuit Court to second-degree murder. A 25-year sentence will run at the same time as his current life sentence for murder, according to court records. The arrangement does not allow him to return to court to ask a judge to shorten his sentence, a spokeswoman for Anne Arundel County prosecutors said.

At age 69, Betty Smithey learned that sometimes you really do get a second chance. On Monday, the nation's longest-serving female inmate used a cane to walk carefully out the front gates of an Arizona state prison, where she had spent 49 years for the 1963 murder of a child. The reason: A parole board decided that after nearly half a century behind bars, she wasn't the same troubled person who had strangled a 15-month-old baby. And for the first time in several tries, a sitting governor agreed.

A convicted murderer who stopped eating when prison officials wouldn't give him the peculiar diet he requested has lost more than half his weight and is apparently on the verge of death. Teshome Abate, 39, has lost about 75 pounds since starting his hunger strike in August, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Corrections said. The 5-foot-10-inch inmate now weighs about 74 pounds. Abate has been in a hospital in Tucson since September, when prison officials got a court order allowing them to force-feed him. Abate has thwarted efforts to feed him intravenously by pulling out the tubes.

COLEMAN -- An inmate serving a life sentence for a 2005 double murder in Vermont apparently committed suicide at the Federal Correctional Complex here, according to prison officials. Prison guards found James E. Richitelli, 54, hanging from the top bunk of his cell just before 4:30 p.m. Monday during an inmate head count. Prison doctors pronounced him dead at 5:08 p.m., authorities said. Richitelli, of Eastford, Conn., pleaded guilty last year to first-degree-murder and aggravated-murder charges for killing a friend and a former acquaintance at their home in Montgomery, Vt. He was sentenced to life in prison in Vermont without the possibility of parole.

UNDER President Obama 's ill-fated, $787 billion-with-a-B stimulus, West Virginia received a whopping $126.3 million to bring high-speed Internet to more than 1,000 institutions. To put that in perspective, that's more than half what the state spends each year on prisons. The state paid $22,600 for routers that served as few as one computer and expanded fiber connections. In Huntington, the state connected a building apparently without consulting its occupants first.

Today we're talking about two very different topics with a common goal — saving taxpayers money. Let's start with the Florida Citrus Bowl , where sports boosters have been begging for bucks for more than a decade. Depending upon when you talked to them, these guys just had to have $50 million … no, make that $250 million … wait, OK $175 million … but really $190 million to get the stadium in proper working order. They just needed taxpayers to cough up the cash.